Elon Musk, South African/Canadian/American/British entrepreneur extraordinaire, founder of PayPal, SolarCity, Tesla Motors, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies and SpaceX, shows exactly how capitalism can get on board with stopping climate change. The man isn’t just a wealth creator, he’s a world changer, and he’s not exactly losing money doing it. Apart from on Hyperloop, maybe, but give it time.
Allegedly, Elon was the inspiration for the big-screen version of Iron Man – billionaire playboy and engineering genius.
As all Avengers fans will know, Iron Man is nothing without the power supply for his incredible suits, the arc reactor. And the same goes for Elon Musk, the real-life Tony Stark. Of course, whilst Stark inherited Stark Industries, Elon Musk created his ground-breaking tech companies from scratch.
But he has the same problem – power.
SolarCity installs about a third of the domestic solar power systems in the US, the Tesla model S is just about the most successful electric vehicle ever produced, what do these two companies have in common? The need for high efficiency batteries.
High efficiency batteries are the new holy grail, philosophers’ stone, and, indeed, arc reactor of the modern age. We have an enormous number of ways to generate electricity, with the means to derive it from our biggest local energy source, the sun, getting cheaper at a phenomenal rate. The popularity of electric cars is on a similarly steep trajectory, with twice as many electric cars sold in 2014 as 2013. But progress on electricity storage technology has been glacial.
But now Iron Man has entered the business.
The Arc Reactor
So, what does the Arc Reactor look like? Well, it’s currently available in five colours and three sizes. The smallest is a 7kWh domestic unit, for $3,000, and the largest is a 100kWh model for utilities. But they’re all modular, so the system is infinitely scalable – you can stack them up to create megawatts of storage.The domestic model is called the 'powerwall', as it's wall mounted, the utility-scale version is the 'powerpack'.
The initial customers are likely to be relatively wealthy households with solar arrays and possibly electric cars, who are currently generating an intermittent supply which may not match up with their variable demand. Instead of buying electricity when their generator is idle, and selling it when they’re generating an excess, you can store it and become genuinely energy-independent.
The Future
This smoothing of supply has benefits for everyone from the deep-green off-gridder all the way up to the grid itself – at the present, we need enough generation capacity to meet peak supply (twenty million people making a cuppa at half-time) even when a few units have been knocked out through accidents, intermittency or maintenance. Peak demand is a LOT more than average demand. Better storage, in the form of distributed batteries in homes and cars, could massively reduce the amount of generation capacity we need.
And the significance of efficient batteries goes a long way beyond smoothing out intermittent generation, important as that is. Centralised generation is grossly inefficient in all sorts of ways - not only do you lose energy in transmission, but you have to construct a national grid to do so.
National grids are useful, particularly if you already have one lying about, but across the world there are still many millions of us living off-grid, and not, in most cases, through their commitment to deep-green ecology. Connecting remote villages with hundreds of miles of pylons and cables is expensive. So are high-tech batteries, but they’re dropping in price, and today’s announcement should be a sign of that drop accelerating. The most exciting part of Tesla Energy is actually on the production side – the batteries will be made in the world’s biggest factory – the Tesla Gigafactory in Nevada – and Tesla hope the economies of scale will drive the price of a SolarCity/Tesla system lower than gas. That’s gas in the UK sense – electricity is already a far cheaper transport fuel than petrol.
If the business world manages to produce a couple more Iron Men, the poorest parts of the developing world could skip over twentieth century energy infrastructure entirely and move straight to twenty-first century clean tech. The supervillains in the fossil fuel industry will do their best to stop that – like the tobacco industry, they have plans to retreat into the developing world as they become pariahs in the West. But this is an Iron Man film, and in Iron Man films, supervillains always lose.
